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April 12, 2016
Pope Francis said on Tuesday that "persecution is the Church’s daily bread.”
VATICAN CITY – Hundreds of Christian families are returning to Sadad, Syria, more than two years after their city was overrun by terrorists, a local official said.
TORONTO – The “fires of persecution” are bringing Christians worldwide closer together, a number of faith leaders in Toronto believe.
Look around. Three in 10 people you see claim they are pretty satisfied with life, happy, healthy and moral, too.
TORONTO – In six months Cardinal Thomas Collins’ misgivings about the 2015 Synod on the Family have been banished by a deeply scriptural Synod summation from Pope Francis.
Pope Francis’ long meditation on love in the family does more than sum up two meetings of the world’s bishops in Rome in 2014 and 2015. Francis is bringing a new spark to an old fire.
Sex is not something the Church fears or is trying to control. Sex is not the opposite of prayer and spirituality, it’s not something we grudgingly concede to the young. Sex is not merely the mechanism of reproduction, although there’s no such thing as a full and true understanding of sex that can’t live with our human capacity to make babies.
April 13, 2016
Two years after the abduction of nearly 300 Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram militants in northeast Nigeria, some parents are still hoping their daughters will one day be rescued.
VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis' trip to Lesbos, Greece, April 16 comes at a frightening and critical time for tens of thousands of refugees and migrants waiting and wondering where they will end up, said members of Catholic aid agencies.
If the Supreme Court of Canada says Canadians have a right to a doctor’s help in committing suicide, Ottawa South MPP John Fraser says we also have a right to timely access to quality palliative care.
EDMONTON – The spectre of assisted suicide is leading aging people to "fear an institution that should be the last thing they should ever fear — a hospital," said Edmonton Archbishop Richard Smith.
An Italian journalist said he was given private documents by a Vatican official detailing problems with financial reforms and that he had a duty to publish them.
WASHINGTON – The American religious nonprofits challenging their participation in the contraceptive mandate under the Affordable Care Act agreed with a U.S. Supreme Court proposal that such coverage be provided through an alternative health care plan without involving the religious employers in a legal brief filed with the court.
April 14, 2016
VATICAN CITY – Before St. John Paul II arrived in Greece in 2001 there were protests by Orthodox faithful and an all-night prayer vigil by Orthodox monks on Mount Athos, praying that the pope would not come.
One must be docile to the Holy Spirit, said Pope Francis Thursday at Mass in his residence of Casa Santa Marta, and one must not resist Him. Pope Francis warns against those who resist the Spirit with "so-called fidelity to the law" and invites the faithful to pray for the grace of the docility to the Spirit.
OTTAWA – Bishop-elect Scott McCaig traces the beginning of his priestly vocation to a chance glimpse of a sign on the side of the road.
WARSAW, Poland– A Polish archbishop who resigned after sexually molesting Catholic seminarians has been warned by the Vatican to stay away from commemorations of Poland's Christian conversion and an upcoming visit by the Pope.
OTTAWA – Euthanasia and assisted suicide advocates may end up getting more than they bargained for when they reach their waning days, said a doctor with Canadian Physicians for Life.
VATICAN CITY – In a "humanitarian and ecumenical gesture," not a political one, Pope Francis is to join Orthodox leaders in personally meeting with hundreds of refugees and migrants stranded in Greece, the Vatican spokesman said.
In the movie based upon Jane Austen’s classic novel Sense and Sensibility, there’s a very poignant scene where one of her young heroines, suffering from acute pneumonia, is lying in bed hovering between life and death. A young man, very much in love with her, is pacing back and forth, highly agitated, frustrated by his helplessness to do anything of use, and literally jumping out of his skin. Unable to contain his agitation any longer, he goes to the girl’s mother and asks what he might do to be helpful. She replies that there’s nothing he can do, the situation is beyond them. Unable to live with that response he says to her: “Give me some task to do, or I shall go mad!”